Yes, US healthcare is unquestionably top-notch, but what happens when your insurance denies you that top-notch care?

Don't feel so comfy because you have "great health insurance". Someone's job at that insurance company is to deny you care, and they're some of the best detectives in the country. If your claim for treatment is denied by Aetna/BlueCross/Company X and you die, the adjustor who denied you is getting a bonus. Profiting from death? That's capitalism.

In 2007, CIGNA refused to pay for the liver transplant 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan desperately needed to survive because it was "too experimental." She ended up dying from lack of treatment.

Nataline Sarkisyan was a patient at the UCLA Medical Center, a NON-PROFIT hospital that is the second highest earning hospital in the Los Angles Area at nearly $3,451,676,928 according to the following link

for being a non profit, they receive a 2.1 billion dollar tax break so that they can perform charity care. If you want to lay blame for this woman death, blame the NON PROFIT HOSPITAL THAT REFUSED CHARITY CARE TO SOMEONE WHO NEEDED IT. They receive billion dollar tax breaks for JUST THIS SITUATION so instead of blaming an insurance company blame the non-profit hospitals for robbing the tax payers blind.

A 12-year-old boy who was born with only one arm, had been denied coverage for his prosthesis on the grounds that he had reached his "lifetime maximum benefit for prosthetic devices." The insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan[/QUOTE]

More information although I will say that losing an arm or being born without one is not a condition that will kill you, certainly sad and difficult, yet thousands of Americans live fully productive lives with one arm.

Otto Raddatz, a lymphoma patient, lost his health care coverage while still undergoing chemotherapy. Fortis Insurance said it terminated his policy because he didn't disclose a note that a doctor once wrote in his file -- that he didn't know about -- indicating he had a small aneurysm and gallstones. [/QUOTE]

In fact, the man, Otto S. Raddatz, didn't die because the insurance company rescinded his coverage once he became ill, an act known as recission. The efforts of his sister and the office of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan got Mr. Raddatz's policy reinstated within three weeks of his April 2005 rescission and secured a life-extending stem-cell transplant for him. Mr. Raddatz died this year, nearly four years after the insurance showdown

Blue Cross agreed to insure Wittney Horton and accepted her premium payments -- until she got sick. After Horton sought treatment, Blue Cross opened an investigation into her medical records and found a note from one of her doctors suggesting that she might have polycystic ovaries. Based on the note, which Horton never knew about, Blue Cross rescinded her medical coverage.[/QUOTE]

Terrible story, however you dont identify what she got sick from. If it was the polycystic ovary, a condition that if diagnosed has a very high success recovery rate, the the doctor should have been sued for malpractice. The insurer has every right to rescind coverage if a pre-exsting condition is not fully disclosed. If she didnt know then 1) it is her doctors fault, 2) HER OWN DAMN FAULT FOR NOT KNOWING ABOUT HER OWN HEALTH.

Ian Pearl, who was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy soon after birth, survives with the help of medical technology, including the ventilator he needs to breathe. Late last year, however, his insurer, Guardian, scaled back his coverage even though the limited care is, according to his family, likely to kill him.

Shortly before Robin Beaton was scheduled to undergo a double mastectomy in 2008, her insurance company revoked her policy. Beaton, a breast cancer patient, never disclosed that she'd previously seen a dermatologist for acne, a condition her insurer, Blue Cross, said qualified as a pre-existing condition. "The sad thing is, Blue Cross gladly took my high premiums, and the first time I filed a claim and was suspected of having cancer, they searched high and low for a reason to cancel me," Beaton told a House committee.

Beaton turned to Texas Rep. Joe Barton for help. Barton said his staff went to work, but the insurance company, he said, was "unyielding." Barton appealed to the company's president, who promised to investigate personally. The president called Barton back within four hours and said the coverage would be reinstated and she got the surgery. Despicable that they would do this, however this $30,000 procedure could have been covered once again by a non-profit hospital who get billions in tax write offs.

I hate people that post idiotic, cut and paste bs from the internet just like you did BLART. You deliberately search out headlines that support your predetermined moral stance and deliberately lie and obfuscate the truth to fit your argument. You, just like every other liberal want to villify the private sector for corporate greed and profits, yet are perfectly content to allow non-profit hospitals and other institutions who abuse their tax exempt status to continue operating as if nothing is wrong. If liberals spent one tenth the amount of time being intellectually honest and equal in their criticisms of the non-profit healthcare world, which is designed to care for the indigent and poor, I would have some respect for your other arguments in relation to the for profit healthcare world.

FYI the head of the UCLA Medical Center, David Feinberg earns 1.42 million dollars a year. Maybe if they didn't pay him so much, that woman would be alive for $45,000 operation, but I forgot .....non-profits are so saintly.

Obamacare is imploding. But thanks to the government shutdown, everyone is talking about the implosion of the GOP instead.

The shutdown drama has distracted from the fact that Obamacare’s debut is worse than many realize — and it threatens the fundamental viability of the law itself. The administration claims the Obamacare online exchanges crashed because the Web site got more than 8 million hits in the first week. Please. You know how many people visit Amazon.com every week? More than 70 million. The difference is: 1.) Amazon seldom crashes, and 2.) on Amazon, people actually buy something...
...
If enough Americans don’t join the exchanges, Obamacare collapses. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the administration needs at least 7 million people to join the exchanges for Obamacare to be financially viable. While the administration won’t reveal sign-up rates, London’s Daily Mail reported that total sign-ups in the first week were just 51,000 people. If accurate, that would mean they have just 6,949,000 more to go to break even.

Watching all this, I am reminded by the baffling number of people who don't know the difference between operating a business or budget, and how economic systems of supply, demand, and scarcity work. People applying the logic of business to economic problems is how you end up with austerity and compounding problems.

We tried to tell you TJ. They never had the numbers. It was never going to work. It was a selfish stunt that Cruz and his Tea Party pulled that will cost all of us tens of Billions of dollars!!!!!

You need to step outside of that small Libertarian news shell and see the whole picture.

You you have no idea how diverse my media universe is. I guarantee you that I read a much more diverse net of media than any other person on this forum - or to be more accurate, my phone reads to me a much more diverse net of media than any other person on this forum. I've probably been through over 100 articles in just the last 5 days from sources ranging from Aljazeera, Japan Times, Salon, Time, Newsweek, New Republic, National Review, and the list goes on and on and on.

I've always known that the numbers weren't there. From the very beginning I've said that this fight was about setting up 2014. And despite what the media is telling you, the Republicans are in a very good position for that battle, especially as Obamacare rolls out.

This fight, as I said from the beginning, was more about drawing battle lines from within the Republican party than it was about anything to do with the Democrats.

Go back and read what I wrote. This has always been about the long game.

I don't see how splitting the party can end up being beneficial. Plus, the GOP has really dropped down in the favoritism ratings with Independents over this bs. That's definitely not good news for them.

When we endorsed Ted Cruz in last November’s general election, we did so with many reservations and at least one specific recommendation – that he follow Hutchison’s example in his conduct as a senator. Obviously, he has not done so. Cruz has been part of the problem in specific situations where Hutchison would have been part of the solution. We feel certain she would have worked shoulder to shoulder with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in crafting a workable solution that likely would have avoided the government shutdown altogether.

I don't see how splitting the party can end up being beneficial. Plus, the GOP has really dropped down in the favoritism ratings with Independents over this bs. That's definitely not good news for them.

Anybody see Obama's address this morning? Full of blame. He played the victim. He's suppose to be in charge and bring people together. He finds it so hard to believe that the country is continually on the brink of default yet can't seem to man up to any of it.

Instead of trying to heal the situation he just threw more ****ing gas on it.

Great leaders lead. They don't whine on tv as if they are victims. That is what he just did. The republicans in congress represent hundreds of millions of people in congress. That's just the way it is. He needs to stop making this so personal to himself.

...it is really an indictment of the House Republican majority and its inability to function. The implication is that the House majority cannot do its job, and has to rely on the intervention of the other chamber controlled by the opposing party to save it from its own blundering. This “works” only in the sense that it avoids the worst consequences of the House majority’s pointless and destructive behavior. As long as this remains the way that Congress “works” for at least the next two years, the U.S. will lurch from one absurd deadline to the next with little chance of any improvement.
...
After watching the display of the last few weeks, it is hard to argue that Republicans should have control over any part of the government. It is even harder to believe that they should increase what control they have.

"The media is probably overstating the magnitude of the shutdown's political impact...The impact of the 1995-96 shutdowns is overrated in Washington's mythology...Democrats face extremely unfavorable conditions in trying to regain the House...The polling data on the shutdown is not yet all that useful, and we lack data on most important measures of voter preferences...The increasing extent of GOP partisanship is without strong recent precedent, and contributes to the systemic uncertainty about political outcomes...But there's a lot we don't know."

Politically, you're right. The Democrats had a great political win just now. But it doesn't really net them anything. There's no real momentum from the win. It's a "yay, we get to continue our course" win, and that course wasn't on track to begin with.

As far as the 2014 election, this gives them nothing. It's too far out, and there's too much that will happen between now and then.

The conservatives, on the other hand, are mobilizing for the primaries. Is there even any grassroots activity happening on the left to move the Democrats in their direction? If not, then the Democrats are losing.

I mean, look at what's happening in this country. The media is calling guys like Steve Christie and Scott Walker moderates. Are you familiar with Steve Christie's politics?

The Tea Part is moving the country t the right in front of our eyes, despite losing political battles like this one. Yeah, it's demoralizing for a day for them, but they aren't going away. This is seen as a long game political war, not a single issue fight.

As his party wallows in shame, a young, prominent GOPer tells Salon why it must lose much more in order to improve

One excerpt:

This I think is a key lesson that I took out of the financial crisis and the aftermath of it. We really thought we’d sort of beaten the business cycle, and we wouldn’t have events that would cause years of sustained high unemployment. And so it was less important to have policies aimed at mitigating that. Now we know that in fact we are vulnerable to that sort of thing, and so we need to figure out first of all what do we do to reduce that probability, and then what do we do to make up for that problem when it happens. And Republicans have just been completely absent on both of those questions.

On reducing the vulnerability, they have basically sniped at Democratic proposals on improving bank regulation without offering substantive proposals of their own. Similarly, there hasn’t been an acknowledgement that when you have years of sustained high unemployment, you can’t just blame the unemployed and say those people are lazy, they don’t want to work.

So the last few years at the federal level, Republicans have just not been offering good solutions to the problems that we face. And then we’ve seen over the last month that because they don’t like the things the other side is doing, they start temper tantrums and do things that are very damaging to the economy. And so I don’t know why I should look at that and say anything other than these people are crazy and awful and shouldn’t be trusted with power.

"The media is probably overstating the magnitude of the shutdown's political impact...The impact of the 1995-96 shutdowns is overrated in Washington's mythology...Democrats face extremely unfavorable conditions in trying to regain the House...The polling data on the shutdown is not yet all that useful, and we lack data on most important measures of voter preferences...The increasing extent of GOP partisanship is without strong recent precedent, and contributes to the systemic uncertainty about political outcomes...But there's a lot we don't know."

Politically, you're right. The Democrats had a great political win just now. But it doesn't really net them anything. There's no real momentum from the win. It's a "yay, we get to continue our course" win, and that course wasn't on track to begin with.

As far as the 2014 election, this gives them nothing. It's too far out, and there's too much that will happen between now and then.

The conservatives, on the other hand, are mobilizing for the primaries. Is there even any grassroots activity happening on the left to move the Democrats in their direction? If not, then the Democrats are losing.

I mean, look at what's happening in this country. The media is calling guys like Steve Christie and Scott Walker moderates. Are you familiar with Steve Christie's politics?

The Tea Part is moving the country t the right in front of our eyes, despite losing political battles like this one. Yeah, it's demoralizing for a day for them, but they aren't going away. This is seen as a long game political war, not a single issue fight.

If you think that Obama isn't going to use every inch of his huge political network to get as many votes as he can for his final two years, it's you who haven't been paying attention.

And, for the record, they've moved the Republican party to the right, not the country. The the Tea Party is of no used to the people in the middle who actually decide elections.